News & Publications

Alan D. George Named Interim Director of PSC

Feb. 27, 2019

Alan D. George, PhD, the Ruth and Howard Mickle Endowed Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering and department chair and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, has been named the interim director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).

AIDR 2019 Begins May 13

PSC Receives Best-Ever Six 2018 HPCwire Awards

PSC Receives Best-Ever Six 2018 HPCwire Awards

Awards Recognize Leaders in the Global High-Performance Computing (HPC) Community

Nov. 13, 2018

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has topped its best-ever performance of last year by receiving six 2018 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards. HPCwire presented the awards at the 2018 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18), in Dallas, Texas. HPCwire revealed the list of winners at their booth at the event and on the HPCwire website, located at www.HPCwire.com.

Stopping HIV in Its Tracks

Scientists have scored a number of victories against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. But these victories are incomplete. We can hold the virus in check, but not cure it. We can reduce the chances someone will be infected, but do not have a surefire way to prevent infection. Scientists from the University of Delaware and the University of Pittsburgh are using the XSEDE resource Bridges at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to investigate how one protein prevents HIV from infecting monkeys. Understanding how it does that, and why the human version of that protein doesn’t, promises a completely new avenue for stopping HIV in its tracks.

PSC Arm of Genome Analysis Center Awarded NSF Funding

National Science Foundation Grant renewal will support expansion of programs supporting genome biology research

Oct. 15, 2018

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has received $289,203 in National Science Foundation (NSF) funding for its work as part of the National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS). The independent grant accompanies an additional $962,613 in NSF funding to NCGAS at Indiana University. Together the two sites will continue the center’s work aiding discovery and innovation in biological sciences that use genomic methods.

The renewal of the three-year grants will support NCGAS’s ongoing and expanding activities, including bioinformatics consulting, education and outreach programs on genome analysis and assembly, and long-term archival storage for genome biologists. The center currently serves researchers across the United States, enabling the analysis and utilization of currently available genomic information. NCGAS leverages Bridges, PSC’s converged HPC, Big Data and AI system, as well as other systems in the NSF-funded XSEDE ecosystem, to enable increasingly large and complex genome and metagenome analyses.

“We’re excited to continue our collaboration with Indiana University to lower barriers for researchers who need to analyze large-scale genomics data,” said Philip Blood, principal investigator of the collaborative NCGAS award and Senior Director of Computational Biology at PSC. “Through this new award, NCGAS will continue to provide biologists with expert help in applying advanced computing technologies to genome analysis that will drive discovery in their fields.”

Illustration of the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, detecting the results of a proton-proton collision. Reproduced with permission from CERN.

PSC & Pitt Build Infrastructure for Human Tissue Atlas

NIH to Fund Mapping System for Human Tissues

PSC and Pitt to Build Computing Infrastructure for Molecular Atlas; Will Allow Biologists to Explore the Human Body in Cellular Detail

Sept. 26, 2018

A collaboration of Pittsburgh institutions will play a key role in enabling biologists to explore the human body in exquisite detail. By flipping among digital maps of different features revealed by modern molecular biology and imaging techniques, scientists will be able to chart a path through human health and disease using massive datasets that would otherwise be too complex to navigate. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a program of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, and the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Pitt’s School of Medicine are undertaking the work as part of $54 million in funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP).

NSF Funds AI Upgrade for Bridges

NSF Funds Artificial Intelligence Upgrade for Bridges

PSC’s Bridges supercomputer is being upgraded to provide the world’s most powerful AI servers to the national research community. The supplemental award of $1.8 million from the National Science Foundation funds acquisition of the resource, which features specialized graphics processing units (GPUs). “Bridges-DL’s” integration with the rest of Bridges and new staff positions will help researchers exploit the system’s full potential.

“PSC provides resources that let people go beyond ‘What can I do, given my local resources?’ to ‘How can I leverage data to make the next breakthrough?’” said Paola Buitrago, Director of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data at PSC and co-principal investigator for Bridges. “It’s breaking that barrier that unleashes creativity and accelerates discovery.”

PSC Part of New NSF-Funded Cybersecurity Group

$4.9 Million Grant Will Protect U.S. Scientific Workflow

Aug. 29, 2018

PSC will be a collaborating institution in a $4.9-million cybersecurity award from the National Science Foundation. The grant will fund a new center focused on protecting and securing U.S. research, led by Indiana University. The PSC part of the new collaboration will be led by Jim Marsteller, PSC's Chief Information Security Officer.

The Research Security Operations Center, or ResearchSOC, is a virtual center led by IU and distributed across that institution and PSC, Duke University and University of California San Diego. ResearchSOC will help provide the research and education community with the cybersecurity services, training and information sharing necessary to make scientific computing resilient to cyberattacks.

Events Calendar

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

PSC is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Established in 1986, PSC is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry and is a leading partner in XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment), the National Science Foundation cyber-infrastructure program.